HoliDaze: Russian To Judgment, Feliz Novichok Edition

The enterprising folks over at Bellingcat have gotten their hands on a recording of a nearly 50-minute phone call between Russian dissident Alexey Navalny and the FSB, where Navalny pretends to be a Politburo aide asking about how the FSB poisoned Navalny in August, and the FSB just tells him on an open line exactly how they did it.

The phone call took place on the morning of 14 December 2020; several hours before Bellingcat and its partners would publish their investigation into the Navalny poisoning. Legal and journalistic standards obliged the co-publishing partners to confront the main subjects of the investigation and offer them the right of reply.

Prior to offering these rights-of-reply, Alexey Navalny requested the opportunity to confront, by telephone, members of the FSB squad implicated in his poisoning. Bellingcat agreed and arranged for its representatives to be present during the calls, for the purpose of obtaining any additional information that might be exchanged.

The calls were made beginning at 4:30 am CET (6:30 am Moscow time) from a location in Germany, where Navalny has been recuperating since his poisoning. In order to increase the chance of his calls being answered by the FSB operatives, Navalny used an IP telephony application which permits the custom-setting of a caller ID. In this case, the number that was selected for ID spoofing was that of an FSB landline which, call records showed, had been in regular communication with several of the squad members.

In the initial calls, which were made to the key members of the FSB squad and chemical weapons scientists who had been in contact with them during the operation, Navalny introduced himself and asked why the respective person had agreed to be involved in a plot to kill him. The called parties did not reply and hung up, with the exception of one of the contacted chemical-weapons scientists: Oleg Demidov — who said he had Covid-19 and couldn’t talk.

In addition to calling most of the FSB operatives on his own behalf (and failing to get a response), Navalny decided to call two members of the FSB squad, Mikhail Shvets and Konstantin Kudryavtsev, by impersonating a senior security official. To both of these officers, Navalny introduced himself as a fictional character: Maxim Ustinov, an “aide to [Chairman of Russia’s Security Council] Nikolai Patrushev”. The premise of the call was that Navalny — playing the role of “Maxim Ustinov” — would ask the officers for an oral report on the reasons for the failure of the Navalny poisoning operation.

The first call — to Mikhail Shvets, a member of the squad who had tailed Navalny during his July 2020 trip to Kaliningrad — was unsuccessful. Shvets listened to Navalny’s introduction as “Maxim Ustinov” and replied “I know exactly who you are”, before hanging up.

The second and last call was to Konstantin Kudryavtsev — a member of the FSB team who had graduated from the Military Biological-Chemical Academy and then worked in the 42nd (biological warfare defense) Institute of the Ministry of Defense, before joining the FSB. As we reported, Kudryavtsev traveled to Omsk twice in the aftermath of the poisoning: once on 25 August and a second time on 2 October 2020. His phone records had also shown that just before and during the suspected time-range of the poisoning, he had been in regular communication with Col. Stanislav Makshakov, the direct commander of the FSB squad and deputy director of FSB’s Criminalistics Institute.

This call was successful. Kudryavtsev initially thought he was receiving a call from Artyom Troyanov (his first line upon answering the phone was “Artyom, greetings…”), an FSB officer who — in Kudryavtsev’s own words — uses that landline number. “Maxim”, the non-existent aide to Nikolay Patrushev, told him that his call was routed via the FSB phone exchange, which might explain why it appears as someone else’s number, and Kudryavtsev appeared to believe this.

“Maxim” told Kudryavtsev that his boss had requested an urgent report from all members of the FSB team involved with the Navalny operation due the enormous problems this operation has led to. (Kudryavtsev implied that he understood what these problems were, saying “I also watch TV and read the Internet”). Kudryavtsev was initially hesitant to talk on an open line, and said he was not informed about all aspects of the operation due to compartmentalizing of information on a need-to-know basis. From his own subsequent account, it appears he was primarily involved with the evidence clean-up following the poisoning attempt and not the poisoning itself. However, “Maxim” was able to convince Kudryavtsev that his presumed boss needs every team member’s personal assessment of the operation, and furthermore, that the call had been authorized by Gen. Vladimir Bogdanov, director of FSB’s Special Technology Department. The latter piece of information appeared to persuade Kudryavtsev, and he agreed to answer detailed questions from Alexey Navalny, acting as the fictitious “Maxim”. This phone call was made before any publication on the FSB squad and their link to the Navalny poisoning operation, and without any of the operatives being publicly named. Thus Kudryavtsev’s decision to open up and share top-secret details seemed to be swayed by the detailed, non-public knowledge “Maxim” appeared to have about the composition of the FSB team that was involved in the operation.

The call lasted for 49 minutes. Navalny did not break character until the end.

 

If I'm the FSB, I offer Navalny a job. You know, for a number of reasons.

 

This is also a pretty good read, so give it a spin.

HoliDaze: The Georgia Gambit

Republicans bet big on the ground game to get out the vote and won big on state legislature races, and nearly took back the House, but lost two key Senate races in Arizona and Colorado and were forced into the Georgia Senate runoffs (not to mention Biden's substantial win in the presidential contest.)  The GOP won smaller "all politics are local" races, but the Dems won the nationalized big ticket battles with a superior national ad campaign, assisted by anti-Trump Republicans who (and it pains me to say this) made a difference.

So what's the plan in Georgia, a single state with two huge nationalized Senate races and control of the Senate itself on the line? Switching off, apparently, as Dems are going after a precisely targeted ground game in Black and Latino communities to get out the vote, while Republicans are betting big on saturating the airwaves and internet ads with tens of millions in out-of-state dark money Super PAC dollars.

Democrats are getting out-advertised in the Georgia Senate runoffs thanks to a megadonor-funded blitz from GOP super PACs in the races that will decide control of the Senate.

Republicans hold an overall advertising advantage across the state, largely fueled by $86 million in outside spending supporting their candidates, compared to just $30 million spent by Democratic outside groups on TV advertising so far, according to AdImpact. Democratic candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are hauling in record small-dollar cash, far ahead of GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler — but not enough to own the airwaves.

Super PACs pay more per ad than candidates do, so Ossoff and Warnock have been able to blunt the GOP’s financial edge, especially in the Atlanta media market, where nearly two-thirds of people in the state reside. But GOP TV ads are running in much higher rotation in other markets, according to data from AdImpact, and the disparity has sparked concern among Democrats that the two campaigns aren’t getting enough help with control of the Senate on the line.

Interviews with a dozen Democratic strategists and donors outlined several key reasons why Republicans have been able to build an advertising advantage. There’s fatigue among Democrats’ biggest donors after pouring millions into the 2020 general election, as well as mild skepticism that Ossoff and Warnock can actually win.

“[Donors] say, ‘I’m tired,’ they say, ‘I’m spending on ground game,’ … and lastly, they say, ‘I don’t think [Democrats] are going to win,’ even though they don’t have good data to back that up,” said one prominent super PAC official, granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly. “The outside money’s been obscene [on the Republican side], and outside money on the Democratic side has been slow.”

Most crucially, there is growing suspicion among some Democratic donors — grounded in the party’s failure to flip control of the Senate in November — that massive TV ad campaigns don’t equal success, and money might be put to better use with organizations operating on the ground in Georgia instead of on the air.

“There’s a feeling in the donor community that too much was spent on TV and not enough on field operations,” said Ami Copeland, a Democratic strategist who served as Barack Obama’s deputy national finance director in 2008. “We had parity plus last time on TV, and it didn’t work. If donors are shifting their contributions and their support to ground operations, that at least shows a willingness to learn very quickly as to what might work and try something a little different.”

That strategic choice is showing up on the ground: Organizations focused on voter registration and mobilization, like Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight, are swimming in record cash. The Indian American Impact Fund announced this week they’d drop $2.5 million to turn out Asian American and Pacific Islander voters through digital ads, mail and field operations. BlackPAC, Collective PAC and the New Georgia Project are all out in force with field programs in the state, even though some activists still say they could use more cash to fund their efforts in these all-important races.

“I do think there’s been a shift with Democratic donors, particularly women donors, who are far more progressive about supporting and understanding [the importance of a] ground game,” said LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, another group based in Georgia doing on-the-ground organizing. “There’s been some shift where there’s more resources on the ground, but I don’t think it’s at the level or at the scale we need.”

Indeed, even while Democrats aren’t thrilled to be outspent on TV, the disparity isn’t generating the five-alarm panic that it might have before November. Most Democrats argued a runoff puts heavier emphasis on turning out voters rather than persuading them, a reality that lends itself to door-to-door canvassing rather than to non-stop TV ads.

A Democratic donor adviser also noted that high-dollar contributors are “very reluctant to put a lot of money on traditional advertising plans” right now.

 

The lesson Republicans took away from November is that local races count, but nationalizing the race wins the nationally-important races. The lesson Democrats took away from November is that nationalizing a local race can mobilize the other side, too.

Both are correct.

We're about to see "by how much".

[Remember, you can donate to ZVTS this Holiday season here.]

HoliDaze: Once Again I Am Asking....

As I said earlier this year, 2020 has been rough on all of us, so if my missives into the void have been of any use to you, please consider dropping a few bucks in the tip jar. If you can't, no problem. I'm glad to have everyone as a reader after all this time and I appreciate your continued support above all.

You can use the Donate button below, or the link at paypal.me/zandarvts.

In Which Zandar Develops A Frame Of Reference Going Forward

Light posting for the rest of the year.  I'm going to need to recharge for January.

As usual I will review my predictions for this year and attempt to come up with ones for next year but at this point I have no idea what I would predict because it might actually come true and this year has just been one long continuous fecal hurricane with a few bright spots of almost comically jarring pre-2020 normality in it as a painful reminder of what used to be.

At least I hope it's light posting for the rest of the year, I feel like that may not happen if things really go reactor core breach politically and there's a non-zero chance of that.

Going into 2021 I have determined this: 

This is a turquoise-ish T-shirt that reads "The problem may not be the Democrats." 

It's a deceptively simple concept, but I don't want to lose track of what's basically the entire premise of this blog over the last oh god has it been 12 years now.

I feel like I'm going to need this a lot over the next four years at least, but here we are.

As you were.

Retribution Execution, Con't

The Trump regime is sabotaging America's global internet access agency in order to hurt the UN and help autocrats like Putin, Xi Jinping, Iran's theocracy, and friends, because the Trump regime was using it for its global pro-Trump propaganda outlet and got caught.

The Trump appointee who oversees the government’s global media operations is moving to shut down a federally funded nonprofit that helps support internet access around the world, documents show, a decision that could limit people’s ability to get around constraints in places that tightly control internet access, like Iran and China.

The appointee, Michael Pack, the chief executive of the U.S. Agency for Global Media is seeking to restrict the nonprofit, the Open Technology Fund, from receiving federal funding for three years, in part because of a dispute over whether the fund should support work done by the Falun Gong, the spiritual movement known for spreading anti-China, pro-Trump misinformation.

His action, a month before President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. takes office, would be difficult for the new administration to undo.

The nonprofit, which is funded by the global media agency, helps develop technology that makes it easier for more than 2 billion people in over 60 countries to access the internet. It is known for helping create tools like Signal, an encrypted messaging application, and Tor, a web browser that conceals a user’s identity while logged onto the internet.

Officials at the fund have 30 days to appeal Mr. Pack’s decision, according to documents. Mr. Pack, an ally of Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former adviser and strategist, will oversee any appeal, legal experts said. His final decision must be made by Jan. 19, one day before Mr. Biden takes office, the documents show.

Legal experts said that Mr. Biden will likely not be able to immediately overturn Mr. Pack’s decision, indicating it could be months before all legal questions surrounding Mr. Pack’s decision are answered.

During that time, the Open Technology Fund would not be able to receive any money from the federal government, and will only have enough funds to keep its staff of 10 employed until June, officials at the nonprofit said.

Without funding, projects that help provide nearly 1 in 4 Iranian citizens and 10 million people in China access to the internet could be at risk of stopping, the officials added.

“This is the kill shot,” Laura Cunningham, acting chief executive officer of the Open Technology Fund, said in a statement to The New York Times. “Without OTF, users around the world will be cut off from the global internet.”

 

The real reason is that the Trump regime was using Voice of America radio network, also a part of the USAGM, as part of the Trump campaign, and Trump's flunky is now exacting a price for investigating him. 

There is a “substantial likelihood” that top leadership at the U.S. Agency for Global Media engaged in wrongdoing, according to an ongoing investigation by the independent agency that oversees civil service law.

The Office of Special Counsel made this determination on Wednesday following numerous complaints by the Government Accountability Project (a whistleblower advocacy group) about U.S. Agency for Global Media CEO Michael Pack and other top political officials. GAP said this type of finding is “notable and rare.” Pack––a former conservative filmmaker and an ally and former colleague of Steve Bannon, former Breitbart News executive and White House chief strategist–– took over about six months ago and his tenure has been marred with controversy and fears about politicization of the agency’s journalism.

“Our clients – current and former staff at [the global media agency], [Voice of America] and its sibling organizations – have reported to federal whistleblower agencies egregious and continuing acts of wrongdoing by Mr. Pack and his enablers,” said David Seide, GAP senior counsel. “It is gratifying that one of those agencies, OSC, has independently determined that there is a significant probability that our clients’ information reveals wrongdoing. It is a significant step, but far from the last one.”

Based on its assessment of the whistleblower complaint, OSC asked Pack to order a review of several actions at the agency since he took over in June and then report back, according to a press release by GAP. Some of them include:

• Alleged violations of the law that protects the “firewall” that prevents political interference at VOA;
• Termination of the presidents of Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Office of Cuba Broadcasting (the news organizations under USAGM);
• Dismissal of the news organizations’ bipartisan board members and replacement with mainly political officials;
• Termination of the president and CEO of the Open Technology Fund, an independent nonprofit within the agency dedicated to internet freedom;
• Prohibition of the offices of General Counsel, Chief Strategy, and Congressional and Public Affairs and others from talking with outside parties, without approval from the front office;
• Hiring and contracting freeze;
• Pressure on career staff to “illegally repurpose” appropriated funds; and,
• Refusal to renew visas for non-U.S. citizen journalists working for VOA.

“It would be problematic for the head of the agency to investigate himself for misconduct,” GAP’s Seide told Government Executive.

 

Pack knows he's done on January 20, so he's planting time bombs to go off as soon as he leaves. Again, it will take every single day of Biden's term, and that of any future Democratic presidents, to just start to fix the damage that four years of Trump have done to America.

Sunday Long Read: The Most Human Of Races

Our Sunday Long Read this week is Ed Yong's chronicle in The Atlantic of the medical science community's global response to find the COVID-19 vaccine, and how science prevailed in record time, despite America's Trumpian failures at every turn.

 

In fall of 2019, exactly zero scientists were studying COVID‑19, because no one knew the disease existed. The coronavirus that causes it, SARS‑CoV‑2, had only recently jumped into humans and had been neither identified nor named. But by the end of March 2020, it had spread to more than 170 countries, sickened more than 750,000 people, and triggered the biggest pivot in the history of modern science. Thousands of researchers dropped whatever intellectual puzzles had previously consumed their curiosity and began working on the pandemic instead. In mere months, science became thoroughly COVID-ized.

As of this writing, the biomedical library PubMed lists more than 74,000 COVID-related scientific papers—more than twice as many as there are about polio, measles, cholera, dengue, or other diseases that have plagued humanity for centuries. Only 9,700 Ebola-related papers have been published since its discovery in 1976; last year, at least one journal received more COVID‑19 papers than that for consideration. By September, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine had received 30,000 submissions—16,000 more than in all of 2019. “All that difference is COVID‑19,” Eric Rubin, NEJM’s editor in chief, says. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, told me, “The way this has resulted in a shift in scientific priorities has been unprecedented.”

Much like famous initiatives such as the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, epidemics focus the energies of large groups of scientists. In the U.S., the influenza pandemic of 1918, the threat of malaria in the tropical battlegrounds of World War II, and the rise of polio in the postwar years all triggered large pivots. Recent epidemics of Ebola and Zika each prompted a temporary burst of funding and publications. But “nothing in history was even close to the level of pivoting that’s happening right now,” Madhukar Pai of McGill University told me.

That’s partly because there are just more scientists: From 1960 to 2010, the number of biological or medical researchers in the U.S. increased sevenfold, from just 30,000 to more than 220,000. But SARS-CoV-2 has also spread farther and faster than any new virus in a century. For Western scientists, it wasn’t a faraway threat like Ebola. It threatened to inflame their lungs. It shut down their labs. “It hit us at home,” Pai said.

In a survey of 2,500 researchers in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, Kyle Myers from Harvard and his team found that 32 percent had shifted their focus toward the pandemic. Neuroscientists who study the sense of smell started investigating why COVID‑19 patients tend to lose theirs. Physicists who had previously experienced infectious diseases only by contracting them found themselves creating models to inform policy makers. Michael D. L. Johnson at the University of Arizona normally studies copper’s toxic effects on bacteria. But when he learned that SARS‑CoV‑2 persists for less time on copper surfaces than on other materials, he partially pivoted to see how the virus might be vulnerable to the metal. No other disease has been scrutinized so intensely, by so much combined intellect, in so brief a time.

These efforts have already paid off. New diagnostic tests can detect the virus within minutes. Massive open data sets of viral genomes and COVID‑19 cases have produced the most detailed picture yet of a new disease’s evolution. Vaccines are being developed with record-breaking speed. SARS‑CoV‑2 will be one of the most thoroughly characterized of all pathogens, and the secrets it yields will deepen our understanding of other viruses, leaving the world better prepared to face the next pandemic.

But the COVID‑19 pivot has also revealed the all-too-human frailties of the scientific enterprise. Flawed research made the pandemic more confusing, influencing misguided policies. Clinicians wasted millions of dollars on trials that were so sloppy as to be pointless. Overconfident poseurs published misleading work on topics in which they had no expertise. Racial and gender inequalities in the scientific field widened.

Amid a long winter of sickness, it’s hard not to focus on the political failures that led us to a third surge. But when people look back on this period, decades from now, they will also tell stories, both good and bad, about this extraordinary moment for science. At its best, science is a self-correcting march toward greater knowledge for the betterment of humanity. At its worst, it is a self-interested pursuit of greater prestige at the cost of truth and rigor. The pandemic brought both aspects to the fore. Humanity will benefit from the products of the COVID‑19 pivot. Science itself will too, if it learns from the experience.

 

Science will survive and continue to thrive, but it's easy to see just how close we came to a genocidal disaster, one America and the world barely escaped this time...and may not escape the next time.

 

The Coup-Coup Birds Take Flight, Con't

We've reached the point where Trump's cultists are now openly calling for the end of American democracy and a martial law military coup that keeps Trump in power "as long as necessary". Not only are they confident in saying it, but they are increasingly confident that it will happen, and that Democrats will be rounded up and disposed of.

An 1807 law invoked only in the most violent circumstances is now a rallying cry for the MAGA-ites most committed to the fantasy that Donald Trump will never leave office.

The law, the Insurrection Act, allows the president to deploy troops to suppress domestic uprisings — not to overturn elections.

But that hasn’t stopped the act from becoming a buzzword and cure-all for prominent MAGA figures like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, two prominent pro-Trump attorneys leading efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and even one North Carolina state lawmaker. Others like Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser who was recently pardoned for lying to the FBI, have made adjacent calls for Trump to impose martial law. The ideas have circulated in pro-Trump outlets and were being discussed over the weekend among the thousands of MAGA protesters who descended on state capitols and the Supreme Court to falsely claim Trump had won the election.

At its core, the Insurrection Act gives the president authority to send military and National Guard troops to quell local rebellions and violence, offering an exemption to prohibitions against using military personnel to enforce domestic laws. Historically, it has been used in moments of extreme national strife — the Civil War, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, violent labor disputes, desegregation battles, rioting following Martin Luther King Jr.’s death.

Only once, however, has it been used in the wake of an election — and that was to stop a literal militia from seizing the Louisiana government on behalf of John McEnery, a former Confederate officer who had lost the 1872 governor’s race.

Nonetheless, in the minds of some authoritarian-leaning and conspiracy-minded Trump supporters, the Insurrection Act has become a needed step to prevent President-elect Joe Biden from assuming the presidency. Their evidence-deficient reasoning: Democrats illegally rigged the election and are attempting a coup, and Trump must send in the troops to undo this conspiracy.

The conviction shows how hard-edged MAGA ideology has become in the wake of Trump’s election loss. While scattered theories about a “deep state” arrayed against Trump have long circulated in MAGA circles, calls for troops to stop a democratically elected president from taking office have taken those ideas to a more conspiratorial and militaristic level. It also displays the exalted level to which Trump has been elevated among his most zealous fans as his departure looms.

“The central theme here is that there supposedly exists a network of nefarious actors trying to undermine Trump and destroy the United States, and that this is a tool that Trump could use to save the day,” said Jared Holt, a research fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, who focuses on far-right extremism.

The Insurrection Act has been rarely invoked since the civil unrest of the 1960s — the last time was to quell violence during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. And when it has been used over that period, it was always at the request of a state governor.

But over the past several years, it has gained popularity among the far-right fringes, mainly as a way for Trump to solve all their problems, from expelling undocumented migrants, to arresting generals and other “deep state” actors for allegedly plotting coups against Trump.

The idea has also become intertwined with the QAnon movement, the far-reaching and baseless conspiracy that Trump is secretly working to disrupt a cabal of pedophiliac, sex trafficking Democrats and global elite.

 

This is what they want, their fever dreams dark and rich with the blood of dead Black folks, brown folk, and "race traitor" whites, and they are waiting for Trump to give them permission to slaughter.  Republicans are terrified of losing 'their power' to anyone they deem inferior to them, and what they want is to be allowed to kill with impunity, to drag us out into the streets and empty their firearm clips into our bodies.

 

And yes, Trump is absolutely considering it. 

 

President Donald Trump convened a heated meeting in the Oval Office on Friday, including lawyer Sidney Powell and her client, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, two people familiar with the matter said, describing a session that began as an impromptu gathering but devolved and eventually broke out into screaming matches at certain points as some of Trump's aides pushed back on Powell and Flynn's more outrageous suggestions about overturning the election. 

Flynn had suggested earlier this week that Trump could invoke martial law as part of his efforts to overturn the election that he lost to President-elect Joe Biden -- an idea that arose again during the meeting in the Oval Office, one of the people said. It wasn't clear whether Trump endorsed the idea, but others in the room forcefully pushed back and shot it down. 

The meeting was first reported by the New York Times. 

White House aides who participated in the meeting, including White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and counsel Pat Cipollone, also pushed back intensely on the suggestion of naming Powell as a special counsel to investigate voter fraud allegations Trump's own administration has dismissed (or, as seems more feasible, hiring her in the administration for some kind of investigatory role). Powell has focused her conspiracies on voting machines and has floated the notion of having a special counsel inspect the machines for flaws. 

Another idea floated in the meeting was an executive order that would permit the government to access voting machines to inspect them. 

One person described the meeting as "ugly" as Powell and Flynn accused others of abandoning the President as he works to overturn the results of the election. 

"It was heated -- people were really fighting it out in the Oval, really forceful about it," one of the sources said. 

One of the sources described an escalating sense of concern among Trump's aides, even those who have weathered his previous controversies, about what steps he might take next as his term comes to an end. 

Shortly after that meeting, Trump's campaign staff received a memo from the campaign legal team on Saturday instructing them to preserve all documents related to Dominion Voting Systems and Powell in anticipation of potential litigation by the company against the pro-Trump attorney.  

They think Trump is going to give them that, and they are willing, some of them, to fight and die for him. And he very well might.

 

The answer of course is to treat seditious traitors like seditious traitors. 

New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen says elected representatives who refuse to accept the peaceful transition of power should be sanctioned. “These senators and members of Congress who have refused to acknowledge that we had a free and fair election in which Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by over 7 million votes, are bordering on sedition and treason in thinking that they are going to overturn a duly elected president,” she said.

Make the price for supporting Trump's sedition higher than accepting Biden's win.

Last Call For The Galleria Of Crime, Con't

Jared Kushner is a crafty bastard, and the Trump crime family continue to rob his cultists blind. Paul Waldman at WaPo:

If you thought you’d heard about all the financial chicanery Donald Trump and his family have engaged in during his presidency, rest assured there’s plenty more to be revealed. Here’s the latest story, courtesy of Business Insider:

President Donald Trump's most powerful advisor, Jared Kushner, approved the creation of a campaign shell company that secretly paid the president's family members and spent almost half of the campaign's $1.26 billion war chest, a person familiar with the operation told Insider. 

The operation acted almost like a campaign within a campaign. It paid some of Trump's top advisors and family members, while shielding financial and operational details from public scrutiny. 

When Kushner and others created the company in April 2018, they picked Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump to become its president, Vice President Mike Pence’s nephew John Pence as its vice president, and Trump campaign Chief Financial Officer Sean Dollman as its treasurer and secretary, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations about the shell company.

To be clear, it could well be that no laws were violated, scrupulous about obeying the rules as the Trump and Kushner families are known to be. But the whole point of shell companies is to hide something; in this case, the campaign was able to show over $600 million in payments to the shell company, American Made Media Consultants Corp., on its Federal Election Committee filings, without the details that would be known if whatever they were spending money on was paid directly to vendors.

And while most of that $600 million probably went to buy advertising, I wouldn’t be too surprised if the favored officers of the shell company got nice salaries, nor if there were ways that it was used to funnel campaign contributions back to Trump himself.

We may never know. But I know this: Trump’s supporters couldn’t care less, even if it’s their money.

That’s because he has spent years convincing them that self-dealing and graft are perfectly fine. The only question is whether it’s the people you like who are benefiting.

This was always Trump’s argument about unethical behavior: not that he’s innocent and others are guilty, but that everyone is guilty, so we shouldn’t worry about his misdeeds. Everyone is corrupt, everyone is on the take, everyone mistreats women, we’re living in a world without morals or principles and all that matters is whether you win.

He never made any bones about it. Even in 2016, when Hillary Clinton charged that he was probably refusing to show his tax returns because he paid no taxes (which turned out to be pretty much true), he replied, “That makes me smart.” Obeying the rules is for suckers and chumps.

By now, Trump’s supporters — who will remain his supporters after he leaves office — firmly believe that. If he pulls a new scam and they’re his victims? That just shows what a genius he is.

 

If Trump takes our money, well, he deserves it.  If you get a dime, we reserve the right to inflict as much violence against you and yours as we can.

 

That's how Trump's America works.

 

We'll still be living in it long after he's out of the White House.

A Supreme Miss On The Miscount

The US Supreme Court on Friday punted on the legal challenge to the Trump regime's efforts to eliminate all undocumented immigrants from the 2020 Census, with the 6-3 ruling by Roberts Court conservatives calling it "premature" and ordering the case sent back to the lower courts for lack of standing.

The United States Supreme Court on Friday, by a vote of 6-3, said an effort to block President Donald Trump from excluding undocumented immigrants from a key Census count was "premature," effectively allowing the administration to move forward with its plans even as the justices left the door open to future challenges.

By subtracting millions of immigrants from the Census total, Trump hopes to shape the apportionment of congressional seats, the allocation of billions in federal funds and the contours of the nation's electoral map for at least the next decade. If he succeeds, it would be the first time in 230 years that the process would exclude large swaths of people inside the U.S.

The Court's conservative majority, in an unsigned opinion, said the scope and impact of the president's promised action is not yet clear.

"At present, this case is riddled with contingencies and speculation that impede judicial review," the Court said.

"The President, to be sure, has made clear his desire to exclude aliens without lawful status from the apportionment base. But the President qualified his directive by providing that the Secretary should gather information 'to the extent practicable' and that aliens should be excluded 'to the extent feasible.' Any prediction how the Executive Branch might eventually implement this general statement of policy is no more than conjecture at this time," it said.

While the Census concluded earlier this year, the government told the Court last month that analysts at the Commerce Department, which oversees the U.S. Census Bureau, were still trying to estimate the number of undocumented immigrants in the country, including a breakdown of long-term residents and more recent arrivals.

"The count here is complete; the present dispute involves the apportionment process, which remains at a preliminary stage," the Court's majority said. "The Government's eventual action will reflect both legal and practical constraints, making any prediction about future injury just that—a prediction."

In dismissing the challenge to Trump's plan for now, the Court made clear that it was not a decision on the merits. "We hold only that they are not suitable for adjudication at this time," they said.

 

Justice Breyer's dissent was powerful.

The liberals’ dissent, which was penned by Justice Stephen Breyer, said that putting off the decision would bring about severe costs, as another round of litigation would delay states’ redistricting processes, and on the merits, the question of the policy’s legality was not “not difficult.” Breyer said that the text of the relevant law, its history and the legislative record behind it support the conclusion that the Trump policy violates statutes passed by Congress concerning the census and apportionment. He stopped short of weighing in on whether it was unconstitutional.

“Where, as here, the Government acknowledges it is working to achieve an allegedly illegal goal, this Court should not decline to resolve the case simply because the Government speculates that it might not fully succeed,” Breyer wrote.

 

We'll see how this shakes out, but I don't have a good feeling on this that the Roberts Court is entertaining the notion that what Trump is doing isn't patently wrong. They have clearly stated that they intend to leave out undocumented immigrants and violate the Constitution. I don't understand the whole "speculation" nonsense.

Anyway, this will get another day before SCOTUS.

 

Looks Like Mitch Will Win Again

Mitch McConnell continues to outmaneuver and outplay Democrats at every turn, like he has for the last decade, and frankly it's getting exhausting. Senate Democrats at this point are walking away from the COVID-19 relief talks with something, better than nothing, and nobody's happy, and it's not just Pelosi and Schumer.

 

It's also far less than what we need, and he's sabotaging the country just like the GOP did with the Obama stimulus 12 years ago.

 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is getting much of what he wants in an emerging coronavirus relief package, after months of digging in his heels against a demand by Democratic leaders to pass a multitrillion-dollar package that would shore up the ailing finances of state and local governments.

The GOP leader isn’t getting liability protection for businesses and other organizations but McConnell himself last week proposed dropping that controversial item along with another large tranche of funding for state and local government.

State and local funding was a top priority of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.).

Democrats are getting $90 billion in relief for local governments but it will be distributed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, meaning city and state leaders will have less control. Democrats say that money for housing assistance will also help ease the fiscal burdens on states.

But McConnell is getting a deal a lot closer to what Democrats dismissed as the “emaciated” plan he pushed in recent months than the $2.2 trillion HEROES Act that Pelosi and Schumer said should have been the “starting point” of the talks.

That was quickly leading to some criticism on Wednesday as it emerged the sides were closing in on an agreement, though in Congress, some Democrats taking shots at the package still said it should be approved.

“This is not any place close to what is needed,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said of the emerging $900 billion deal.

But Warren said Democrats have little choice but to accept a much smaller relief package than they wanted in order to get a deal.

“That makes for a very difficult negotiation,” she said of McConnell’s staunch insistence on a “targeted” package below $1 trillion.

She faulted the GOP leader, saying “Mitch McConnell is willing to let American families walk away with nothing.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) similarly criticized the bill while giving his blessing to its outlines.

Sanders had pushed for a new round of stimulus checks, something that will be a part of the final package.

But the checks will not be as large as he wished, and it will not include other provisions including the aid to local governments that he’d backed.

“There is simply not enough money in the proposal to deal with the unprecedented crises that we now face,” Sanders said Wednesday.

He told CNN that “we met very stiff resistance from Mitch McConnell and the Republican leadership.”

“What we got now is not enough but it is something,” he said.

A Democratic senator who requested anonymity to assess the emerging deal said McConnell largely got what he wanted.

“He got negotiators down way away from where Nancy Pelosi was and he’s going to do a package that’s not going to be enough for the American people and he’s not doing anything on state and local [funding] and he didn’t have to compromise on the liability protections,” the senator said.

So Mitch once again holds the country hostage and wins, while Democrats congratulate themselves that hey didn't butcher even more hostages in the process. Yay, Congress!

In the end, Mitch wins again and again because he is more ruthless, more willing to do whatever it takes to maintain power, and more willing to sacrifice the American people, and the Democrats are  simply not.  If he's still in power come January, expect this to continue for the entire Biden administration:

 

 

Mitch wins because he's willing to shoot hostages, and when they die, the police are always blamed, period. And every single voter will blame Biden and the Dems in 2022 and they will give the GOP even more power, and the cycle of abuse continues until we're all dead.

We have one shot to break that cycle in Georgia on January 5. One.

A Pence-ive Escape Plan

Mike Pence, doomed to be the final traitorous villain in Trump's downfall, is hoping that if he runs away in the final two weeks of his term that the Trump cultists will forget who he is.

On Jan. 6, Vice President Mike Pence will oversee final confirmation of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

Then he’ll likely skip town.

As vice president, Pence has the awkward but unavoidable duty of presiding over the session of Congress that will formalize Biden’s Electoral College victory — a development that is likely to expose him and other Republicans to the wrath of GOP voters who believe President Donald Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen from him.

But Pence could dodge their ire by leaving Washington immediately for the Middle East and Europe. According to three U.S. officials familiar with the planning, the vice president is eyeing a foreign trip that would take him overseas for nearly a week, starting on Jan. 6.

Though Pence aides declined to confirm details of the trip, which remains tentative, a U.S. government document seen by POLITICO shows the vice president is due to travel to Bahrain, Israel and Poland, with the possibility of more stops being added. A pre-advance team of Pence aides and other U.S. officials left earlier this week to visit the planned stops in preparation for the multicountry tour, which would be Pence’s first trip abroad since last January, when he traveled to Rome and Jerusalem on a whirlwind two-day sojourn.

On the surface, the trip is part of a push to underscore the Trump administration’s role in brokering a series of diplomatic agreements to normalize relations between Israel and a handful of Arab countries, including Bahrain. But for Pence, visiting these countries is also a way to bolster already-strong credentials with the Christian right, which strongly supports Israel. And it allows Pence — once again — to put distance between himself and Trump’s complaints about the election outcome that are likely to intensify after Congress affirms Biden’s win.

It’s a tactic Pence has used to navigate the final days of Trump’s presidency: stay out of the spotlight and insulate himself from his boss’s baseless election-fraud crusade, all while still finding ways to burnish his own credentials and technically toe the party line.

Pence has promoted Trump in his work as head of the government’s coronavirus task force and while boosting two GOP Senate candidates facing runoff races in Georgia. But he’s declined to publicize his minimal involvement in the president’s election-fraud strategy. And while he has privately assisted the Trump campaign when asked — joining donor calls and lending his signature to fundraising pleas — his public comments since the election have almost all centered on other topics, including hosting an event focused on the Trump administration's anti-abortion policy at the White House on Wednesday.

“I suspect the timing is anything but coincidental,” one Pence ally said of his tentative travel plans.

 

I have no sympathy for the guy, and I'm actually glad to see that like the previous two Republican Veeps we've had, his political career is essentially over and he has no shot at the Oval Office. Granted, both Quayle and Cheney are making bank in the private sector these days, and I'm sure Pence will go back to Indiana and join a legal firm or stay in DC as a venture capital outfit lobbyist, but what I'd like to see is Pence end up in Leavenworth instead.

What he won't do is run for office again.  He'll be primaried out of existence if the tries, and he knows it. Trump's boundless capacity for retribution will see to that.

Couldn't happen to a more deserving guy.

 

Last Call For The Country Goes Viral, Con't

Trump didn't get the election win he wanted, and Trump didn't get the vaccine credit headlines he wanted, so now states, even red ones, aren't getting the vaccine doses they wanted.

Officials in multiple states said they were alerted late Wednesday that their second shipments of Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine next week had been reduced, sparking widespread confusion and spurring the company’s CEO to put out a statement saying it had millions more doses than were being distributed.

The changes prompted concern in health departments across the country about whether Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s vaccine accelerator, was capable of distributing doses quickly enough to meet the target of delivering first shots to 20 million people by year’s end. A senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal plans, said the revised estimates for next week were the result of states requesting an expedited timeline for locking in future shipments — from Friday to Tuesday — leaving less time for federal authorities to inspect and clear available supply.

But Pfizer released a statement on Thursday that seemed at odds with that explanation, saying the company faced no production issues and had more doses available than were being distributed.

“We have millions more doses sitting in our warehouse but, as of now, we have not received any shipment instructions for additional doses,” the statement read.

A total of 2.9 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was cleared for shipment this week, and 5.9 million doses of Moderna’s regimen are poised to go out next week if the vaccine is authorized, as expected. That will be on top of additional supply from Pfizer, which Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said Wednesday would amount to 2 million doses next week.

That represents a sharp drop-off from what states were expecting, according to health officials in several states. At least three states received notice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday informing them of the shortfall, forcing last-minute changes to vaccine distribution plans for next week. Some places were intending to use the second shipment from Pfizer to begin vaccinating residents of long-term care facilities, officials said, creating dilemmas about whether to go ahead with those plans or to finish inoculating health-care providers on the front lines of the intensifying pandemic.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) said anticipated shipments to the state in the next two weeks had been cut roughly in half. The uncertainty was even more pronounced in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said new shipments from Pfizer were “on hold,” as officials in his administration reported their expected allocation disappearing entirely in Tiberius, the online tracking system the Trump administration is using to coordinate with the states. Fred Piccolo Jr., a spokesman for DeSantis, said the numbers had come back online by Thursday but had been reduced significantly.

“It’s 40 percent less than we were originally thinking,” Washington State Health Secretary John Wiesman said in an interview on Thursday. “We thought we were getting 74,100 and now we are planning for 44,850 doses.”

Pfizer’s statement seemed to point responsibility at the federal government.

“We have continuously shared with Operation Warp Speed and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services through weekly meetings every aspect of our production and distribution capabilities,” it continued. “They have visited our facilities, walked the production lines and been updated on our production planning as information has become available.”

 

If this game sounds familiar, it's the same nonsense we found out was happening with respirators and again with medical PPE equipment as the Trump regime made states compete against either other in order to get the highest price for Trump's friends in the logistics and supply business.

 

But the only supplier right now is Pfizer, and the vaccine is vastly different. In fact, Trump has made several statements saying he wants it distributed to as many Americans as possible, the "Trump miracle vaccine."

Of course, that's when he was running for re-election.  And as the walls close in, it looks like he's screwing over states one last time just to be spiteful, so that governors take the blame.

Or maybe the Trump regime is just amazingly incompetent.

Or both. There's always both.

I Can't Seem To Recall Gavin

California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is almost certainly headed for a recall fight under the state's relatively generous recall vote rules, and while Newsom remains broadly popular, as Politico's Carla Marinucci points out, the recall could be very plausible in a post-Trump "How come he hasn't fixed everything yet?" flood of impatience.

 

A recall by Republicans, who still have the albatross of Donald Trump, an unpopular president in solidly blue California, around their necks, remains a long shot. And Democrat Newsom still enjoys the strong approval of the majority of Caifornians, the latest Public Policy Institute of California poll showed.

But here are five key takeaways on why the Newsom recall attempt shouldn’t be dismissed:

1. THE GOP ESTABLISHMENT IS BACKING IT: The California Republican Party and its chair, Jessica Milan Patterson have endorsed it. So has the entire CA GOP House caucus, according to Rep. Devin Nunes, who said as much last week — and said the party is helping to fire up the recall push. “We're encouraging people to sign the petitions,’’ Nunes told KMJ host Ray Appleton. “The California delegation as we sit today is … in favor of it.’’

Newly reelected Rep. David Valadao confirmed the move. “We all support it,” he said. “Our campaign offices all had the petitions there. A lot of our events had folks there gathering signatures.’’ And conservative darlings like Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee are also on board, with Gingrich agreeing to do Zoom calls and fundraising. Which leads us to...

2. THEY’VE GOT FUNDRAISING MUSCLE: Anne Dunsmore, a veteran GOP fundraiser based in Irvine whose fundraising work helped elect Rep. Mike Garcia in CA-25, told POLITICO she’s now a recall campaign manager and lead fundraiser, and is working her proverbial Rolodex hard. So far, Gingrich’s efforts and online fundraising have only produced small donations. But what concerns Democrats is the notion that all the GOP needs is a couple of wealthy political types, party insiders or business moguls — even from another state — to sign on; after all, dropping $1 million into this effort could be a bargain price for an avalanche of national publicity on Fox, OAN and Newsmax, which are already covering Newsom heavily...

3. THE BAR IS INCREDIBLY LOW: “California’s governor faces one of the easiest recall requirements in the country,’’ said Joshua Spivak, a senior fellow at Wagner College’s Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform. “Voters only need to gather the signatures of 12 percent of voter turnout in the 2018 election – in this case, 1,495,709 signatures. California also grants 160 days to gather them. In other states, the signature percentage requirement is more than double and the time to gather is less than half.” And, he said, “thanks to the use of initiatives, California has a well-developed signature-gathering industry that can get a recall on the ballot.”

Plus, the California GOP has one more advantage, as compared to backers of the failed recall of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. “Wisconsin law requires the elected official to face off in a new election — where he was facing a clear opponent. In California, Newsom would not face an opponent. The vote is simply a yes or no as to whether he should stay in office, with the replacement race further down the ballot.” Which means...

4. THE EAGER HORDES AWAIT ON SOCIAL MEDIA: There will be publicity-seekers, true, but some legitimate office-holders who see a gubernatorial recall as an easy opportunity to get on the ballot will do their best to push for it. And don’t think Democrats won’t consider undermining Newsom if it comes to that. “We’ve gotten calls from Democrats who are already kicking the tires,’’ said one Sacramento insider aligned with a major special interest group.

Secretary of State Alex Padila’s office confirmed this week the requirements to get on the ballot for the recall would be 65 to 100 nomination signatures and a filing fee of $4,194.94, or 7,000 signatures in lieu of the filing fee. Those minimal requirements have essentially not changed since the recall of Gov. Gray Davis in 2003; back then, 135 candidates made the ballot — and that was before the age of Facebook and Twitter. Social media could multiply that number by 100 or more. Our heads hurt.

5. THE PANDEMIC ISN’T GOING AWAY: At least not before March 2021, when the proponents need to turn in 1.5 million valid signatures. That deadline will come after months of business shutdowns, bad news and economic turmoil, over which Newsom may not have control. But he’ll be in charge — and anger at him could get people signing, including the nearly 30 percent of California voters who don’t belong to a major political party.

 

In other words, this is a mess that California Republicans hope will paralyze and consume Newsom in 2021, so they can keep yelling "Well if the largest blue state in the nation can't handle things under a failed Biden administration, why are you still voting Democrat?" 

It only works of course if Newsom blows things so badly that this becomes an issue, but if he sails through this, and California continues on a post-vaccine path to economic recovery, then things will be looking good for Team Blue in 2022.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Just how bad was the FireEye/SolarWinds Russian mega cyber attack on the Trump regime this month? Bad enough for a former Dubya/Trump Homeland Security Adviser to take to the New York Times to tell us how bad it is bad.

At the worst possible time, when the United States is at its most vulnerable — during a presidential transition and a devastating public health crisis — the networks of the federal government and much of corporate America are compromised by a foreign nation. We need to understand the scale and significance of what is happening.

Last week, the cybersecurity firm FireEye said it had been hacked and that its clients, which include the United States government, had been placed at risk. This week, we learned that SolarWinds, a publicly traded company that provides software to tens of thousands of government and corporate customers, was also hacked.

The attackers gained access to SolarWinds software before updates of that software were made available to its customers. Unsuspecting customers then downloaded a corrupted version of the software, which included a hidden back door that gave hackers access to the victim’s network.

This is what is called a supply-chain attack, meaning the pathway into the target networks relies on access to a supplier. Supply-chain attacks require significant resources and sometimes years to execute. They are almost always the product of a nation-state. Evidence in the SolarWinds attack points to the Russian intelligence agency known as the S.V.R., whose tradecraft is among the most advanced in the world.

According to SolarWinds S.E.C. filings, the malware was on the software from March to June. The number of organizations that downloaded the corrupted update could be as many as 18,000, which includes most federal government unclassified networks and more than 425 Fortune 500 companies.

The magnitude of this ongoing attack is hard to overstate.

The Russians have had access to a considerable number of important and sensitive networks for six to nine months. The Russian S.V.R. will surely have used its access to further exploit and gain administrative control over the networks it considered priority targets. For those targets, the hackers will have long ago moved past their entry point, covered their tracks and gained what experts call “persistent access,” meaning the ability to infiltrate and control networks in a way that is hard to detect or remove.

While the Russians did not have the time to gain complete control over every network they hacked, they most certainly did gain it over hundreds of them. It will take years to know for certain which networks the Russians control and which ones they just occupy.

The logical conclusion is that we must act as if the Russian government has control of all the networks it has penetrated. But it is unclear what the Russians intend to do next. The access the Russians now enjoy could be used for far more than simply spying.

The actual and perceived control of so many important networks could easily be used to undermine public and consumer trust in data, written communications and services. In the networks that the Russians control, they have the power to destroy or alter data, and impersonate legitimate people. Domestic and geopolitical tensions could escalate quite easily if they use their access for malign influence and misinformation — both hallmarks of Russian behavior.

 

Russia compromised companies like FireEye and SolarWinds to get to government and corporate networks. They put in back doors to regular server updates this spring, and your corporate IT department installed those tainted upgrades and never questioned them, because they were official from the company.

Now the Russians have everything.  Absolutely everything.

And they got it because of Trump, and the GOP enablers who specifically killed internet and election security legislation.

That's the story, one we're going to have to deal with for years.  And remember, we can trace every major Russian hack over the last several years to the NSA tools Ed Snowden provided to Moscow, and there are still Americans who consider him a hero to this day.

StupidiNews!

• Parts of the Northeast are digging out from a nor'easter that dropped more snow this week than the entire snowfall total of last winter.
• Senior Biden transition team advisor Cedric Richmond has tested positive for COVID-19, the Biden team is taking precautions and so far no additional positive tests have been found.
• Nigerian national security forces have rescued 350 school-age boys from Boko Haram militants, the children were being forced into service as child soldiers.
• The corporate and government victims of the recently discovered SolarWinds Orion hack continues to widen, including the Department of Energy's nuclear arsenal, and software giant Microsoft.
• Sony has pulled both the PS4 and PS5 versions of Cyberpunk 2077 from the PlayStation Network entirely and is offering refunds on the digital version, no word if Microsoft will follow suit.